The dead don't lie. They just don't have long to talk.

Vinny Deluca's gift is simple and brutal: after biological death, he has seventy-two hours to talk to the departed before they fade. As a retired Detroit homicide cop working the county coroner's office in small-town Arizona, he's learned to use those hours well.

When fifteen-year-old Danny Reyes drops dead at a church cookout, the official ruling is cardiac arrest. But Danny's ghost is pressed into the corner of the exam room, shaking, terrified—and he has a name he doesn't want to say.

Pastor Joel Ames built New Hope Community Church from nothing. Forty members became a hundred and fifty. He coached basketball, remembered every kid's name, showed up when no one else did. The town trusts him the way small towns trust the one good thing they have.

Danny's ghost tells a different story. One that involves his older brother, a supply line from Nogales, and girls in the youth group who stopped smiling. But Danny is fading faster than any ghost Vinny has seen—flickering at thirty-one hours, fragments where sentences should be. The clock is running out, the boy is scared, and the man who killed him is leading Wednesday night Bible study.

Four investigations. One truth. And a town about to learn what its shepherd was really feeding his flock.